Man's Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust

What does all this prove? What has come through to us from the past? Two things: everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there are, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.

If, on the other hand, one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.fn10 Long had not chosen to break his neck, but he did decide not to let himself be broken by what had happened to him. As we see, the priority stays with creatively changing the situation

If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines exactly what ‘progresses’ and how far. In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.

Kant himself, in the second formulation of his categorical imperative, said that everything has its value, but man has his dignity – a human being should never become a means to an end. But already in the economic system of the last few decades, most working people had been turned into mere means, degraded to become mere tools for economic life. It

The third aspect of the tragic triad concerns death. But it concerns life as well, for at any time each of the moments of which life consists is dying, and that moment will never recur. And yet is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives? It certainly is, and hence my imperative

All the programmes, all the slogans and principles have been utterly discredited as a result of these last few years. Nothing was able to survive, so it should not be a surprise if contemporary philosophy perceives the world as though it has no substance. But through this nihilism, through the pessimism and scepticism, through the soberness of ‘new

From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past—the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have

Today, our attitude to life hardly has any room for belief in meaning. We are living in a typical post-war period. Although I am using a somewhat journalistic phrase here, the state of mind and the spiritual condition of the average person today are most accurately described as ‘spiritually bombed out’. This alone would be bad enough, but it is mad

We should not be surprised, because ‘existence’ – to the nakedness and rawness of which the human being was returned – is nothing other than: a decision.